The Blind Break and the Invisible Hand, Part 3: Consent

Posted on October 19, 2013 by keithsutherland

Although Peter Stone has asked us not to cite from his draft conference paper, this forum is really just an extension of the debate at the University of London workshop, so I would rather quote it verbatim than run the risk of paraphrasing it and getting it wrong. The following quote is taken from the concluding paragraph (p.16):

If democracy is supposed to be about government by consent of the governed, for example, then sortition looks like an obvious dead end. The arguments for taking elections to represent such consent are quite telling; citizens are thought to consent to be governed by elected officials even if they voted against those officials, or failed to vote at all. But however tenuous the link between election and government by consent, the link between sortition and government by consent is even weaker. There is no sense in which citizens can be said to have done anything to consent to randomly-selected officials; indeed, the whole point of randomization is to remove any opportunity by citizens to influence the selection process.

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The Blind Break and the Invisible Hand, Part 2: Statistical Representation

Posted on October 18, 2013 by keithsutherland

The claim that sortition produces a portrait-in-miniature that “stands for” the target population is categorised by Hanna Pitkin (1967) as a form of “descriptive” representation. I prefer the term “statistical representation” as it makes clear that the reference is to the sample as a whole, rather than the individuals that it is comprised of. There is a temptation to think of sortition as just an alternative mechanism for selecting political officers, and that the end result is still “representatives” akin to the (individual) Honourable Members selected by preference election. But the notion of an (individual) “statistical representative” is clearly an oxymoron. An individual selected as part of a aggregatively-representative sample is just a data point, as in a randomised public opinion survey. In a public opinion survey the views of any individual respondent are of no intrinsic interest, the purpose of the survey is to aggregate individual responses as an indication of the prevalence of different viewpoints within the target population. The fact that individual x has a certain view is irrelevant, all that matters is what proportion of the target population shares the same (or broadly similar) views and the same principle would apply to a representative group constituted by sortition. “Statistical representatives” (to describe the component units of a aggregatively-representative body) is an example of the rare group of terms that only exists in plural form. This places serious constraints on the actions of a body selected by sortition, as statistical representativity only applies at the collective (aggregate) level; indeed it is hard to see what representatives can do other than to register their preferences/beliefs via voting (all votes carrying exactly the same weight), as the differences in the “illocutionary force” of the speech acts of individual members of such assemblies will destroy its aggregative representativity.
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The Blind Break and the Invisible Hand, Part 1

Posted on October 15, 2013 by keithsutherland

Last week’s sortition workshop at Queen Mary, University of London was entitled Sortition and the Consolidation of Democracy. The host and academic convenor was Oliver Dowlen, who was a research fellow at QM, and most of the papers adopted the Dowlen-Stone ‘Lottery Thesis’ that the primary value of sortition is as a prophylactic to protect the political system from factionalism and corruption — a principle that Dowlen and Stone attribute to the arational ‘Blind Break’ introduced by the lottery mechanism. The main focus of my commentary is Peter Stone’s (draft) paper, ‘Democracy and Good Government’ (Stone, 2013), but my arguments are addressed to all three signatories of the ‘Dublin Declaration’ (Delannoi, Dowlen and Stone, 2013),* which, whilst acknowledging that sortition is also a way of instituting ‘descriptive’ representation, concluded that this was a ‘weak’ use of the lot. My claim in this commentary is that the ‘Blind Break’ is a) politically conservative (sortition is capable of protecting the integrity of any political system, not just democracy) and b) philosophically tautological (its ‘strength’ is entirely reliant on the pre-definition of the Lottery Principle).
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Politeia 2.0

Posted on October 15, 2013 by peterstone

This past week, Oliver Dowlen organized a very good workshop in London on “Sortition and the Consolidation of Democracy.” In addition to the academic speakers, we heard a talk from a representative from a Greek civic organization named Politeia 2.0. The group is working with James Fishkin and Stanford’s Center for Deliberative Democracy to use randomly selected deliberative bodies. They want to use these groups to develop proposals to reform the Greek constitution. They have a website at http://www.polites2.org/en/.

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Senate by Lot in Australia?

Posted on October 14, 2013 by Common Lot Sortitionist

[This item was pointed out by other Kleroterians as well.]

The first three minutes of this video commentary in “Business Day” of The Sydney Morning Herald  is a ‘modest proposal’ to choose the Senate as juries are chosen — but excluding members of political parties, or their families, from the lot.

The original concept of the Senate to be the states’ house of review has long since been betrayed. While the major parties in less divisive times might have done some horse trading, the reviewing will now be left to those much-maligned odds and sods with the balance of power.

So to bring balance to the odds and sods, it would make sense to have many more of them and no political parties. Yes folks, it’s time to introduce Senate duty – conscription to the upper house.
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Filed under: Elections, House of Lords, Juries, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

To avoid pathological outcomes

Posted on October 14, 2013 by constitutionalism

Sortition is proposed as a remedy to some pathologies in our present constitutional systems, but if not done well, it could introduce some pathologies of its own. Some of these have been discussed, but we need to focus for a moment on how it could go wrong, and what we could do to avoid that.

Sortition and pillage

Sortition is often offered as a way to avoid having those elected pillage the public fisc for their own benefit or that of their constituents, sometimes called patronage. Public choice theory examines how special interests invest more than most others to influence public decisions for their benefit, by both the selection of decisionmakers and pressure on them to favor those interests to retain office or advance in office. Once elected, officials become a special interest unto themselves, and public choice processes operate within government institutions as well as on elections.
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On theory and pragmatics

Posted on October 8, 2013 by keithsutherland

For some time the sharp disagreements — often ending up as slanging matches — between different members of this forum has intrigued me. If we are all part of the tiny community that is interested in, or even believes in, sortition, then why do we so often come to blows and indulge in name-calling? This post is an attempt to unpack this issue and, hopefully, help us deal with disagreements better in the future. That’s not to say that we should seek consensus, only that we should understand why others might find our own views difficult to stomach.

Theory

Let’s start with the name of this blog — Equality by Lot. Equality is a mathematical abstraction (“no equality without equations!”), which morphed, over time, into a normative ideal. The first philosopher to develop a normative understanding of equality was Plato, but his treatment of equality appears very strange to modern sensibilities. Plato distinguished “mere” arithmetic equality from equality of value, in which each person should receive according to his desert (geometric equality). This has some parallel in Christian thought via the Parable of the Talents (“For to everyone who has will be given, and he will have abundance, but from him who doesn’t have, even that which he has will be taken away.”) However modern Christian sensibilities privilege the (alternative) biblical view that we are all (arithmetically) equal in the eyes of God. This is the view that Jefferson adopted for the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, but that wily old fox Franklin argued that a secular version would be better (“we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”). Of course this is complete nonsense as all the evidence points to the differences (biological and environmental) that we inherit at birth. But no matter, the transition was made from a religious gloss on a mathematical construction to a secular normative ideal.
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David Van Reybrouck: Against elections

Posted on October 6, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Ad van der Ven wrote to draw attention to David Van Reybrouck’s argument in favor of sortition. Van Reybrouck is a prize winning Flemish Belgian author writing historical fiction, literary non-fiction, novels, poetry, plays and academic texts.

His latest book is Tegen verkiezingen (Against elections) (machine translation with my touch-ups):

Our representative democracy is increasingly in the doldrums. Its legitimacy is affected: fewer and fewer people vote, voters are less predictable in their choice, and the membership of political parties is decreasing dramatically. It is the efficiency of less democracy: since long term government is problematic, politicians increasingly align their policies to the next election. It all leads to what is called by David Van Reybrouck democratic fatigue. But how do tackle it? Papering over the cracks – that is what is happening now mainly. There are some renovation trends here and there. Reybrouck fears that this kind of marginal solutions is no longer sufficient and that the existing system will result in more and more crises.
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A theory of sortition, part 2 of 2

Posted on September 29, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Part 1 is here.

Extension of self-representation

Like many other authors discussing sortition (Dahl, Leib, Zakaras, Fishkin, and others), Stone and Dowlen choose, then, to drastically downgrade sortition from a tool of radical democratic reform (as presented by C&P, or earlier by C.L.R. James) to an add-on to the electoral system. Such a retreat is certainly not warranted by the theoretical considerations discussed in the first part of the article. The claim that sortition can be expected to produce good government can be put on a much more solid theoretical foundation than the faulty intuitive argument provides. An alternative argument works by employing the properties of sampling in order to extend self-representation of the decision-making group into representation of the entire population. It goes as follows:

  1. A small group of people, under reasonably favorable conditions, is able to represent its own interests. This claim is not directly associated with sortition, but is rather a claim about the political dynamics of small groups of people in general. The claim is that when a small group of people, meeting on an a-priori egalitarian basis, has the opportunity to make collective decisions that would promote the interests of the members as they perceive them, then it will tend to do so. This is a situation which most people would be familiar with – group decision making in the family, within a group of friends or with colleagues. “A small group” is taken to be a group in which all-to-all communication is possible. The upper size limit of such a group would depend on the circumstances, but even under the most favorable circumstances a few hundred people seems like the most that would fit the description.
  2. Policy that promotes the interests of a small group of people which are selected as a sample of a larger group will tend to promote the interests of the larger group as well. Since the interests of a group selected as a sample of a larger group are typical of those of the entire group, policy that promotes the interests of the sample would tend to promote the interests of the group. In particular, if a certain policy promotes the interests of a majority of the members of the sample then that policy is likely to promote the interests of a majority in the population. There would be some obvious exceptions to this extension from sample to population. Policy that applies directly to the members of the sample in their role as members – their salaries for example – affects interests for which the sample members are very atypical. In a government by sortition such exceptions would have to be treated separately.

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A theory of sortition, part 1 of 2

Posted on September 28, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Mirroring

In his Introduction to A Citizen Legislature by Ernest Callenbach and Michael Phillips, Peter Stone commends the authors for doing “an excellent job of presenting the idea of a representative House — a House that will truly be “of the people” — as an inspiring piece of democratic reform.” On the other hand, such inspiring presentation does not meet the philosopher’s standard of a good argument: “Their [C&P’s] efforts to defend their proposal, however, have a number of shortcomings.”

Stone rejects the implied argument that descriptive representation is a desirable end. Descriptive representation is a means, not an end, Stone argues: “descriptive representation is desirable because — and only to the extent that — it contributes to the goal of good lawmaking.” And while some may reject this point of view, and argue that the symbolism of microcosm is indeed an end in itself, I think that would be an evasion of the main point. The essential function of government is to generate good policy – i.e., policy that promotes the interests of the population – and, as Stone asserts, sortition is a useful tool if and only if it can be expected to produce a government that generates good policy. (By “interests” I mean to encompass whatever a person, or a group of people, perceive, upon informed and considered reflection, as important or desirable.)

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